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I guess I'm not the only one having a problem with development on our low/slow core portable computers (MBP in my case).

Just the other day a friend of mine voiced his dismay over the fact that "there was a point in time - a sweet spot seemingly - not too long ago, where we could work effortlessly on an (underpowered) Macbook Air / Macbook".

I'd have to echo that as the compounding tax on single / multi core CPU resources has grown substantially over the last couple of years - both through a "renaissance" of more compilation heavy toolchains on one side as well as the (dare I say it?) "microservices as a monolith" effect through explosive adoption of container based "architectures" on the other (docker-compose anyone?).

After more than a dozen very happy years on almost as many Macs I'll seriously get back to developing on a powerful Linux workstation – looking forward to less computational overhead over Docker on both wetware/hardware alone.. I'm really just waiting for Threadripper to make that happen.

My new iPad Pro will be there for administrivia / communication / ideas (very much looking forward to the highly pencil informed iOS 11) – of course I'll also keep my MBP to get it out of the drawer for the occasional asset manipulation with Affinity Designer (the 2 core Broadwell with 16GB RAM should last for many years for those kinds of tasks).

2 comments

That sweet spot has nothing to do with compilation or Docker, and everything with the rise of Electron. Before, an app was built with native UI libraries, running on Python with core elements in C++ for speed. After, a simple app (like Slack or WhatsApp desktop) will eat 300-500mb, use 1-10% CPU and chew through your battery alive.

Yeah it's pretty shocking how much CPU and memory Electron apps use.

Used to be Java chat apps and IDEs (Eclipse, IntelliJ) were considered slow and bloated.

They're practically fleet footed compared to the new breed of web apps.

As much as I love Slack, Visual Studio Code and Atom my maxed out MacBook Pro is at 50-100% CPU and paging into swap with all three open.

If I send a few GIFs in Slack - temps hit 99C (never 100 for some reason) and my laptop sounds like a mini hovercraft.

It's a little disheartening and really has me missing those big old Mac Pros which were silent no matter the task.

JavaScript and the resulting apps are certainly enjoyable to code and use but damn does something need to change in terms of resource utilization.

Hey there, sorry even without using any Electron apps I still have performance issues which in my case have 99% to do with building applications within the bounds of "microservice" architectures. That said Electron apps sure eat up lots of (mostly single core) resources too, which ultimately amounts to a bad UX.

Something you might want to try is hosting a Kubernetes server on some more powerful machine (like a VPS or something at home) to run some of the Docker services you won't actively be developing against.

Thanks for the idea :) I actually did something along those lines - completely switched to emacs within a tmux session on some large EC2 instances but meanwhile optimized my workflow (introduced more isolated TDD) so that performance is bearable enough on my local machine..